Karma

I have always been careful to note how difficult it is to discern a tone of voice when someone is typing to you. Talking online with someone you don’t know very well, or at all, it’s hard to get a good sense of their meaning when a conversation could go either way. But you know that after talking to someone for a long time, or knowing someone in real life at the same time, you pick up on patterns that tell you when they’re joking and when they want to bite your head off.
At least, most of the time you can tell.
There’s a lot of room for critical error.
But I digress.
Nowadays, most people who you know day to day have spots of their own on the internet. My best friend, for example, has a blog on spirituality and Taoism that I check on a daily basis. I’d say I know my best friend pretty darn well. We probably know each other better than nearly anyone else we know. And so, as I peruse the intricate articles, my subconscious automatically draws a little on what I know of the writer to form a mental voice for each piece. I know where it’s all coming from. But I often wonder what it sounds like to all those people who have simply stumbled upon the site, and make their way through it all with only their own ideas to frame an interpretation. It’s strange to think what mental images they would come up with.
I’m not going to tell anyone how to read them, or how to think of the person who wrote them. To sit here and say “this is what was meant by this sentence” would completely destroy the effect which, the way I see it, the internet was meant to have - the generation of independent thought. When we put ourselves on the internet and release our opinions to the world, it is all we can do to try and deliver an impression that shows the world how we want to be perceived. And even then it can’t be guaranteed, because not everyone is going to read all of your information, nor are they bound to interpret it the way you wrote it, obviously.
So I think the biggest mistake people can make is to put themselves out on the internet and expect to be seen the way they know themselves to be. There are countless substanceless web sites layered across the internet like dead leaves. They have age, sex and location stamped across them, plastered with photographs and blog entries that their authors believe capture the best aspects of their bodies and personalities. In the end one knows very little of them by seeing these things.
The internet, for all it offers, doesn’t have one definition. It is the broadest, most unkempt source of information, a torrid ocean flecked with riches and laced with debris. One must enter with no expectations. Lay out what you’ve got as best you can, and let the rest make of it what they will — because whether one agrees or not, a thousand smaller thoughts spring forth from the consideration of each word and that, after all, is the point.
I do, however, want to try to clarify one point.
Chances are you’ve gotten into an argument online before. And chances are, you’ve used the argument, when explaining yourself, that they can’t say you did it aggressively because instant messaging didn’t have a tone of voice.
Unless you use a bunch of those dumb IM smileys. Those things bug the hell out of me.
But that means you know they couldn’t have necessarily ‘heard’ you the right way. And I know this, because I’ve said it before, even if I had somehow assumed that they could tell. So I don’t want this piece to come off as telling you it’s your fault for communicating under the assumption that you’ll be understood. I can’t condemn you for that, and I can’t condemn you for the excuse (because sometimes it’s downright true, and sometimes it’s just incredibly handy). But I’m not saying that I will try and look past any of the immature, useless juvenile tripe clogging the internet just becuase there might be a deeper person behind it, either. They’d make a better impression if they cared enough to bother. I won’t even begin my rant on MySpace. At least it’s contained, like a quarantined debilitating sickness you can choose whether or not to expose yourself to.
So I’m not blaming anyone for how they read things or how they write them. It’s just an interesting thing to think about next time you expose a part of yourself to the increasingly entropic web. Whether you care how you come off or not.

Staple removers are adorable.
And I know I’m not the only one that thinks this! It sounds like a strange thing to say of a small metal implement shielded in plastic with razor-sharp fangs, bent solely on the forceful removal of all stray staples. But it is, isn’t it? Only today, I was turning it over and over, and I thought to myself, which way is it cuter? I mean, one set of fangs fits around outside the other. So on the one hand you have this rather quirky monster-like underbite that goes *graawwrr gnar gnar* … and if you turn it over, you get this adorably vampire-like overbite that’s more like *rawr!! nip nip nip.* I’m rather partial to that one.
But I will probably never know which way is ‘right side up’.
The one at this desk is pink. It sits on the sill of the whiteboard with its mouth open, facing the blue stapler which, all told, really seems unfazed. I suppose the stapler knows that there’s no chance of those steely teeth fitting up into the staple chamber, nevermind grabbing onto any of the unbent staples. But by the look of it, the little one thinks it can.